Hits and misses in the fight against animal extremists.

Oxford University is to resume work on its new biomedical research building as …

Every country seems to have its violent lunatics. When they come from Saudi Arabia, they hijack planes and fly them into buildings. In the US, they blow up federal buildings or abortion clinics, but in the UK they prefer to blow up scientists instead. It has always been a land of animal lovers, but sadly some people take the anthropomorphising a little too far and consider that animals are deserving of all the same rights that humans are, despite all the obvious flaws in that contention.

As a result, domestic extremists have conducted a 30 year campaign against those involved in biomedical research over the use of research animals. This is despite the fact that there is not a single drug or therapy on the market or being used in the clinic that has not been tested for efficacy and safety in animals before being tried on humans. Not one. It's not that animals are used for fun, but in the case of drug testing it is mandated by law, and primary research would be utterly useless if the only options were ex vivo tissue from autopsies and surgery.

The methods used by the extremists have ranged from car and letter bombs targeting scientists - one of my undergrad professors has been targeted - wrecking laboratories and releasing animals into the wild, resulting in their almost certain death, and more recently conducting terror campaigns against the families of people involved in the industry, be they breeders, builders or even banks that they feel are supporting animal research. The beginning of last year saw a victory for the militants, when Cambridge cancelled it's plans to build a new, world-class primate research centre. Similar efforts have been directed towards Oxford, who have been building a new research facility to upgrade the housing of most of the animals used by the different departments. Work was stopped in July 2005 following threats to the contractors, but was resumed last week*, signalling a triumph of science over terror.

Now, it's somewhat ironic that these terrorists are so active in the UK as compared to the rest of the world - the UK has the most stringent rules governing the use of research animals. As someone who has worked in research both in the US and UK, there was real culture shock comparing the regulations each country applies, and I was stunned to discover that federal legislation governing the use of research animals specifically excluded small rodents from regulation.

It seems that violent animal extremists are to join that other terrible UK export, reality TV. According to another report in this week's Nature*, British animal rights extremists are taking their terror campaigns abroad:

"In the first half of 2005, there was an increase in illegal actions in Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany," Matfield says. "Much of it is either organized by British activists, or they have travelled abroad to get involved."

European police forces have detained British activists after illegal
incidents, he says. Research laboratories are targeted indirectly, by
attacks and threats to the property of their staff and those of
companies that work with them.

Even the US is not immune:

The fierceness of US animal-rights activism currently lags about five
years behind the British, says George Goodno, spokesman for the
Foundation for Biomedical Research, a Washington DC-based nonprofit
organization that defends animal research and collects information on
illegal protests (see graph). "It definitely is ramping up," he says.

The United States became aware of the growing extremist activity in the country this September when Huntingdon Life Sciences, a research organization that conducts animal testing, was denied a listing on the New York Stock Exchange at the last minute. It was widely reported that this was owing to threats from SHAC, which proclaimed victory

As long as the public want new drugs and therapies to treat the multitude of illnesses and diseases that afflict them, their pets and their livestock, then research involving the use of animals will be a necessary fact of life. That is not to suggest that researchers enjoy working on animals or take pleasure in causing them discomfort; animals are expensive to house and results have to be filtered through the species gap. Any time there is an alternative that is either cheaper or provides more relevant results, it gets used, but despite the claims of the animal rights brigade, these instances are much fewer and further between than all of us would hope.